In Light of Recent Events

Rain is water that falls from the sky in drops.

Raindrops are formed when water droplets in clouds condense onto each other and grow. When the droplets become too heavy to stay in the cloud, they fall to Earth as rain. 

Raindrops are more than 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeters) in diameter.

Rain is a major part of the water cycle and is responsible for depositing most of the fresh water on Earth. 

Raindrops typically range from 100 to 1000 per cubic meter. When the drops are smaller, the precipitation is usually called drizzle. 
-bill kenny

Think of it as Means Testing

Here's a hypothetical for all of those who like to wonder WWJD? 

Meanwhile Big Pharma wants to talk to Him about all those lepers He's cured.
-bill kenny

Life Doesn't Just imitate Art

"One thing about television, it brings out personality. People are able to watch me in action. They hear my voice and see my eyes. There's nothing I can hide. That's me. Television brings out your flaws, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your truths.

 The audience either likes you or it doesn't." 

"Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?.

"If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil."

Twin sons of different mothers.
-bill kenny

Passion Is No Ordinary Word

From well over a decade ago.

I keep a wallet filled with foolscap, absolutely crammed. It works out well, unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of all the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away I was a little too tightly wound (that gasp of incredulity you may have just heard from people who've known for three decades is legit. The Me of Back Then makes the Me of Now look comatose; I may have actually slept with my jaw ratcheted closed. I cannot imagine in hindsight why I didn't have a stroke, unless, perhaps, it's because I'm a carrier).

I couldn't let go of my anger. The Air Force, to my relief as their employee, rather than dump me amongst the flora and fauna, decided to send me to the head of the Psychiatric Services Wing at the Rhein-Main (Air Base) Clinic, Colonel Doctor Robert G--. He was terrific and very funny (because he thought I was if I'm being honest) and very willing to try to rescue a wild-eyed junior enlisted Sammy Glick impersonator who kept wading out into the deep end.

He came up with the foolscap. Every time something angered me, I was to write it down on a piece of paper and put the paper in my wallet. But every time I'd write something down, his rule was that it had to be on its own, separate, piece of paper. No doubling up, no lists. 

By the end of the day, I could, and did, have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. No worries had to review ALL these slips each night and put them on a different sheet of paper, all those items I was still ANGRY about (I could put those on a single piece of paper) and then I'd put that list on my nightstand. 

The night before I would go to see him at the hospital, I had to review the (six) pieces of paper, and transfer anything I was still angry about, to yet another piece of paper and bring that one piece out to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists, simply because I'd review all the slips of paper of all the things that made me angry and realized I had no idea what the heck was written on most of them or what the words I could read actually meant or concluded (after reviewing the note and thinking about it, which G-- told me later was the key point) whatever had happened to spin me up wasn't that important after all.

How about this week or real soon (and I mean real soon) we all decide to use the G-- Solution. Watch the news, read a newspaper, check out a column online--we are REALLY CRANKED about a lot of stuff. We all know or know of, someone who wants to "fix" things by looking to punch someone in the nose.

I know people who tune in to certain TV programs just to yell at the talking head in the vapor box who is making a fortune by yelling at them. I guess they watch because it feels so good when the show is over (which explains the uptick in cigarette sales I guess). 

There are others who insist on reading columnists' words out loud and follow every line of the writer's argument with a scowl, a gesture, or a deprecation. And we just keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people every day. we don't know how to get off the escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our ancestors back in the ooze didn't care if they evolved to have legs that carried them from the pond and helped us grow lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. It's the grinding though, that is wearing us out, the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose. You wanna feel silly about how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap?

Okay--tell me five things this country was PO'ed about at eight AM on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. Too hard? Gimme three things, how hard could that be? No? Do you want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and important tasks at hand instead? Go ahead, I'll make a note of where we were and we can get back to it sometime real soon.
-bill kenny

Subject to Your Briefing

No one I hope would ever confuse the Mango Mussolini with Antigonish though many of the MAGA Morons do confuse him with some kind of national savior. 

I will concede he does resemble George Washington who was first in war and first in peace and never was indicted. Actually, DJT looks just like him, if you close your eyes and hold your nose, just like the GOP is seemingly very willing to do last night as Election 2024 achieved lift-off. 

a/k/a A Waste of Broadcast Bandwidth

"Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today

I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three

The man was waiting there for me.

But when I looked around the hall

I couldn't see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don't you come back anymore!

Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

Oh, how I wish he'd go away..."

-bill kenny (channeling Hughes Mearns)

Strangers in a Strange Land

Remember when we all used to live together in a shared country? (Together being the operative word) We didn’t always get our own way and we tended to favor the notion of having one political party in control of the White House while the other one was in Congress. 

We had infinite and nuanced shades of grey, if not anatomically, then metaphorically. As opposed to the here and now when we have the most abrupt, bruising, and brusque form of non-nuanced conversations in all the years I've been carrying around this bellybutton.

We’ve divided ourselves according to four-letter non-words, MAGA and WOKE and never the twain shall meet. We have clenched jaws, cold eyes, and hardened hearts, but that doesn't mean we can't talk-it just means we won't. Somewhere we decided two diatribes equals one dialogue and I GET TO GO FIRST! (sorry). 

If we yell AT one another long enough, from a distance somewhere in space it may look like we are talking to one another. Respectful disagreement has disappeared. If you don't agree with me you are the most awful person in the history of the planet, as is everyone else related to you, everyone else related to them and everyone any of you know. Except when I do that much finger pointing some of the fingers on that hand point back at me. Hmmm.

Labels such as 'liberal' and 'conservative' are now pejoratives hurled like discount store invective at opposing viewpoints, appropriate or not, and the reaction to the labeling obscures quite nicely any opportunity to see the person we've just tagged. Now all we are is disagreeable when we disagree. 

And we engage in preemptive shouting matches with one another in forums supposedly designed to let us exchange ideas and views. The longer the meeting, the louder the yelling and do not get me started on the understanding (the smoker you drink, the player you get).

We have ongoing arguments over rights and responsibilities and insist the other person ‘needs to read the Constitution’ when, more often than not we’re referring to the Bill of Rights but fail to realize the distinction or the difference (much less the irony). 

Back in the days of not that long ago we used to talk things out and arrive at consensus through reasoned discussion and informed debate. Now the line between responses that range from gee-willikers to jihad makes it almost impossible to discuss anything. 

I mention this because in the fall we have local elections for both Board of Education and seats on the City Council and we owe it to those who have offered themselves as candidates for office to speak in coherent and complete sentences about what we want and what we feel we need and how we propose to work together (that's a key phrase in my house) to achieve the continued development and improvement of our city and our public schools.

We need to acknowledge that you can't shake hands with someone who has balled fists and a closed mind, no matter how hard you try. We need to relearn how to speak to one another, one at a time and then transition to larger groups. With luck and pluck, we might get the hang of how we used to do all this, back when we all lived in the same country at the same time.
It’s worth a try. 
-bill kenny

And if You're Lucky

The farther out in space you go, the more alike we look I've been told. And since I know we all smile in the same language I tend to believe that so I get a little confused and a lot frustrated when and where we start creating differences without distinction for no discernible reason except to be unpleasant.

And take my word as a semi-professional azzhole for most of my life, just about the last thing we need in this world at any time is MORE unpleasantness, and yet,  here we go: Ladies and Gentlemen, the International Chess Federation with a move apparently not subject to a take-back request.

It seems some of us have decided an even more interesting and challenging game than chess is continuing to treat people who have done nothing wrong but be their authentic selves as some form of garbage. 

Bear in mind as the song says,
"Can't be too careful with your company; I can feel the devil walking next to me."
-bill kenny